My favorite folks ! :)

18 December 2009

Fini ! (Almost)

Well, Duane got the packages in the mail for me. I think he sent them UPS. I had three going, one to my parents for them & Sis #2 & her family, one to my "Montana Mom," & one to my recently married niece & her hubby.

But i'm not quite done as i didn't finish Sis #2's scarf. It will arrive to her sometime in January.

She is getting the hat (kind of stuffed with my white shirt to show the pattern) & the promise of a scarf. The scarf would have been done long ago if i hadn't tried out about 10 different patterns. The one i really wanted to do was a trellis. And i think i did about 50 rows of it, maybe more. But even tho it is a fairly simple pattern, i'd made a mistake early on & it showed (to me) badly. And i didn't know how to fix it. And, this yarn is so dark that the pattern didn't show up very clearly, anyway. This is what i've finally decided upon. Since the hat ended up being a diagonal, i looked up "diagonal lace scarf" & found this one. It is easy. It has a few mistakes in it (all the ones i did have) but they don't show up as intensely as the trellis pattern mistakes.

This is the one i was working on. This is the pattern by which the hat is done. It is a simple pattern, just SL1, K1, PSSO over & over. But i found that those PSSOs were taking forever & it would end up being a MARCH gift, the way i was going. And frankly, this scared me a little because i knew that if i messed up & made a mistake or dropped a stitch, i would never be able to fix it, or even pull out rows & pick up the stitches again.

Here's the pic of them all together, before i wrapped & mailed them. (The scarf on the right didn't go, of course.) The two next to it, the green & camouflage ripple & the sage horseshoe should have been properly blocked. But i forgot. So i ironed them, but sent instructions to the recipients on how to do it if they want.

Ok, i've a funny story. I taught myself to knit from a book when i was about 21 or 22, so i've been doing this a long time. My sis (#3) has been knitting off & on for a while, but is still rather a beginner.

My Montana Mom told me long ago that i do a beautiful job but i hold the yarn & needles differently than anyone else she knows.

My sis told me recently that she thinks i'm doing it backwards. In checking it out, i find that i'm knitting into back rather than a proper knit. So on Sis #2's scarf i tried to do it "properly" & i could not get the pattern to turn out. I had to go back to the way i was doing it.

Because i'm rather a beginner at knitting too, meaning that even tho i've been doing it a long time i'm not advanced in the type of knitting i do, i really struggled with the green & camouflage ripple scarf. The only increases i'd ever done were yarn overs which is something you don't want with this scarf. I think i wrote of this previously. I never did get it down properly & ended up doing a different increase with 6 additional stitches.

Anyway i was at the yarn store the other day & she happened to be working on the same scarf & i asked her to show me how to do that increase. Watching this lady knit, i again was reminded that i "knit backwards." I mentioned that & she responded, "Oh no! You can't knit into the back. Your patterns will never turn out right." And, i think that funny 'cause my patterns usually do turn out fine, & the one i tried doing "proper knit" was all over the place!251

They're very pretty, and I particularly like the color. What a lovely color that would be on a drab, winter's day. Sort of gives a lift to the spirits, just when it would be needed.

I wouldn't worry about the right way, or the wrong way to do something, since it's the results that matter. My brother is a classically trained chef, but I'm simply a good cook (he's a very gifted one). That last time we cooked together he was appalled by how I wield a knife, evidently my technique is faulty.

Which might matter to me if I was being graded, but since it's all about how something tastes in the end, I didn't care (which further horrified him).

If it looks pretty and the patterns turn out well, it doesn't really matter if you do it with the proper technique, or knit it with your feet :-) Your work looks lovely, so score!